The Greatest Inventors of All Time

Ever since the dawn of man, inventing has been part of our history. There are people who work day in and day out to provide solutions for a better life and improve life altogether. These people are inventors. Through out history, there have been numerous inventors which changed our lives today. Now, I present five who were able to start the change from the past, to the age of information technology.

The first great inventor to credit for the current information technology age is actually a group of three inventors. They all won the Nobel Peace Prize in Physics in the year 1952 for their invention; the transistor. John Bardeen along with William Shockley and Walter Brattain were able to invent a device which can amplify or switch electronic signals.

Why is the transistor important in the modern age? Simple, it's only inside and is the key active component in almost all, if not all, modern electronics. This paved way to the invention of numerous electronic devices we use today like your average electronic shaver, radio, television, cellular phone and the computer, which brings me to my next inventor.

In 1941, a computer called the Z4 was released by Konrad Zuse. There were other computers at this time, but his invention was the world's first program-controlled Turing-complete computer. In simpler terms, Zuse's Z4 computer was the first to create calculations based on the compatibility theory. Modern computer programs are based on this design; it is the first modern Turing-complete machine.

Thirty-two years after Zuse invented his Z4; the first ever automatic electronic digital computer was created and credited to John Vincent Atanasoff. This almost didn't happen due to a patent dispute in the case Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, in the end Atanasoff won the patent and was recognize in inventing the first, digital computer.

Talking about age of information technology, how we can send documents, pictures and information anywhere in the world in a blink of an eye, we cannot disregard the contribution of Alexander Graham Bell in the year 1875, the telephone. This was the first step in connecting the world together; this paved the way for the greatest invention for the modern information technology age, the WWW.

Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau are two names that would go down in history for connecting the word through their marvelous invention which started with just an idea in December, 1980. Berners-Lee proposed a project that would help facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers using hypertext. Using a NeXTcube at CERN while he was an independent contractor there, he and Robert were able to create the first Web server. In 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium was founded by Berners-Lee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He made this into a royalty-free idea as a standard, and thus here we are.

These inventors with their brain child were able to change the world we know today. They created the road to an age we belong today, the age of Information Technology.